Category / Publishing

New BU publication in Public Health

international, open access, Publishing, writing

This week the Oxford Encyclopaedia published our contribution on religious organisations and health promotion [1].  The paper in question ‘Faith Communities and the Potential for Health Promotion’ is co-authored by scholars based in England, Scotland and Canada. This new publication is part of a growing number of publications at Bournemouth University on the contribution of faith communities to public health.

Faith communities often have multiple resources, existing networks and an infrastructure that can be applied to health promotion programmes for their own membership or as an outreach to the wider community. Health programmes in a faith community in high-income countries may include targeted initiatives, ranging from walking groups or weight checks, health events, or health assessments, to diabetes self-management. These activities can be organised by charities and NHS organisation and held at local churches, synagogues or mosques which is referred to as faith-placed health promotion.  If the health promotion is part of the ministry of the religious organisation it is referred to as faith-based health promotion.

On top of this encyclopaedia entry, the Open Access journal African Health Sciences [Impact Factor 0.66] accepted our paper in the same field a few weeks ago.  This  paper ‘Influence of faith-based organisations on HIV prevention strategies in Africa: a systematic review’ formed part of the first author’s M.Sc. in Public Health [2]. Our previous papers reported on a study of faith-based and faith-placed health promotion in and around Dundee [3-4].

 

Professor Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Prenatal Health

 

References

  1. Kiger, A., Fagan, D., van Teijlingen, E. (2017) Faith Communities and the Potential for Health Promotion. In: Encyclopedia of Health and Risk Message Design & Processing, Parrott, R. (ed.) New York, Oxford University Press. (http://communication.oxfordre.com/).
  2. Ochillo, M., van Teijlingen, E., Hind, M. (2017) Influence of faith-based organisations on HIV prevention strategies in Africa: a systematic review. African Health Sciences (accepted June).
  3. Fagan, D., Kiger, A., van Teijlingen E. (2010) A survey of faith leaders concerning health promotion and the level of healthy living activities occurring in faith communities in Scotland. Global Health Promotion 17(4): 15-23.
  4. Fagan, D., Kiger, A., van Teijlingen, E. (2012) Faith communities and their assets for health promotion: The views from health professionals and faith leaders in Dundee, Scotland, Global Health Promotion 19(2): 27-36.

Funding Opportunity – Roadmaps to human biology-based disease research

Funding opportunities, international, Publishing

Call Outline:

To support strategic scientific dialogue around the concept of extending the vision of “21st century toxicology” to the wider biosciences, Humane Society International and The Humane Society of the United States are offering grants of up to $10,000 (USD) in funding to support the development and open-access publication of in-depth, independent review articles in discrete areas of human disease/biomedicine by health scientists with relevant expertise.

Who can apply

• Health researchers holding a PhD (or equivalent) degree and be able to demonstrate relevant experience in the disease area they propose to review.
• Eligible individuals may currently be employed in a health research position in the academic, private or public sectors, or may have retired from such a position.
• Applications will be accepted from single authors or groups.
• The current call is restricted to applicants in the United States, Canada, European Union and South Korea.

The closing date for this call is 30 June 2017

If you are interested in applying to this or other non-UK funded calls, please contact Emily Cieciura, RKEO’s Research Facilitator: EU & International.

 

Bibliometrics: an introduction to research impact metrics

BRIAN, open access, Publishing

New training opportunity from the library’s academic liaison team

RKE Development Framework Workshop – “Bibliometrics: an introduction to research impact metrics”

Wednesday, 31st of May,  10am – 12pm

Understanding and demonstrating impact is becoming an essential part of any research activity.

Have you ever wondered how other people are citing your work? Do you know how to calculate your “h-index”? Have you heard of Altmetrics? Come along to this session to find out more.

Topics covered will include:

  • Journal quality (SCOPUS, Web of Science, Scimago)
  • Article quality
  • Researcher quality
  • Easy metrics via BRIAN
  • Your external research profile
  • Differences between disciplines
  • Other measures to show impact (Altmetrics)
  • Using impact data.

To book a place, follow this link:  https://staffintranet.bournemouth.ac.uk/workingatbu/staffdevelopmentandengagement/fusiondevelopment/fusionprogrammesandevents/rkedevelopmentframework/skillsdevelopment/bibliometrics/

SciVal’s Field weighted citation impact: Sample size matters!

Guidance, Publishing, Research assessment, Research Ethics, Research Integritiy, writing

There’s been a buzz on social media recently about Field weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) particularly around the recent leak from the University of Manchester that the FWCI is one of the measures suggested by which to assess academics most at risk of redundancy:

In his recent blog on The Bibliomagician Blog  (reposted here with permission) Iain Rowlands a Research Information & Intelligence Specialist at King’s College London and a member of the LIS-Bibliometrics committee questions the stability of the FWCI indicator for sets of fewer than 10,000 documents. Ian invites others to use his methodology to further test his theory…

SciVal’s field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) is an article-level metric that takes the form of a simple ratio: actual citations to a given output divided by the expected rate for outputs of similar age, subject and publication type.  FWCI has the dual merits of simplicity and ease of interpretation: a value of 2 indicates that an output has achieved twice the expected impact relative to the world literature.  It is a really useful addition to the benchmarking toolkit.

The trouble is that, typically, the distribution of citations to outputs is highly skewed, with most outputs achieving minimal impact at one end and a small number of extreme statistical outliers at the other.  Applying the arithmetic mean to data distributed like this, as does FWCI, is not ideal because the outliers can exert a strong leveraging effect, “inflating” the average for the whole set.  This effect is likely to be more marked the smaller the sample size.

I explored this effect in a simple experiment.  I downloaded SciVal FWCI values for 52,118 King’s College London papers published up until 2014.  I then calculated mean FWCI and 95% confidence (or stability) intervals for the whole sample using the bootstrapping[1] feature in SPSS.  Then I took progressively smaller random samples (99%, 98%, and so on to 1%, then 0.1%), recalculating mean FWCI and stability intervals each time.

The findings shows how mean FWCI becomes less stable as sample size decreases.  Highly cited outliers are relatively uncommon, but their chance inclusion or exclusion makes a big difference, especially as the number of outputs decreases.  In this experiment, FWCI values range across four orders of magnitude, from 0.03 to 398.28.

FWCI chart_black

What does this mean for interpreting FWCI, especially when benchmarking? The table below offers some guidance.  It shows typical stability intervals around FWCI at different scales.  The final column assumes that SciVal spits out a value of 2.20 and shows how that figure should be interpreted in terms of its stability.

FWCI Table

It’s pretty clear from this analysis that you need to know when it’s time to stop when you are drilling down in SciVal!  Another implication is that there is no sensible justification for quoting FWCI to two let alone three decimal places of precision.  I’ve kept the second decimal place above simply for purposes of demonstration.

I am well aware that the guidance above is based on data from just one institution, and may not travel well. If you would like to replicate this experiment using your own data, I’m happy to share my SPSS Syntax file.  It automates the whole thing, so you just have to load and go off on a short holiday! Just drop me an email.

Ian Rowlands is a Research Information & Intelligence Specialist at King’s College London and a member of the LIS-Bibliometrics committee.

ian.rowlands@kcl.ac.uk

Writing Days – Book On!

Publishing, writing

As part of the Writing Academy, a series of writing days have been organised to help support BU authors work on their publications by providing some dedicated time and space, away from everyday distractions.

The days will have a collaborative focus on productive writing with other BU authors, the RKEO team will also be on hand to provide authors with help and guidance on all areas of the publication process.

Writing Days have been scheduled on the below dates:

  • Tuesday 9th May
  • Thursday 25th May
  • Friday 9th June
  • Monday 19th June
  • Tuesday 20th June
  • Wednesday 5th July
  • Thursday 27th July

Spaces are limited so please only book on if you are able to commit to attending for the whole day.

Click here to book on!

BRIAN OFFLINE – 2nd & 3rd May 2017

BRIAN, Publishing, Research assessment, staff profile pages

BRIAN is being upgraded and will be unavailable for use on Tuesday 2nd and Wednesday 3rd May.

 

 

The main improvements from this upgrade include:

  • New Impact Tracking Module
  • New Homepage
  • More User Friendly Navigation

The new and improved features will make BRIAN easier and simplier to use for everyone, whilst also providing a valuable tool to academics helping them record the impact of their research

All relevant guidance notes and video guides on the Staff Intranet will be updated in due course. If you need any help using the new system or if you encounter any problems after the upgrade, please do send an email to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk and a member of staff will be able to assist you.

BRIAN training sessions are also available:

  • Thursday 15th June 2017

With further dates planned. If you are interested to book on to any of these training sessions, please click here to book on!

In the meantime, if you do have queries relating to the upgrade, please get in touch with BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk

Deadline Extended: Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis

conferences, international, open access, Publishing

The deadline has been extended to the 14th of April , 2017.

This is a call for papers for the Special Session on Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis at IEEE CIBCB 2017.

The IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (IEEE CIBCB 2017) will be held at the INNSIDE Hotel, Manchester from August 23rd to 25th, 2017.

This annual conference has become a major technical event in the field of Computational Intelligence and its application to problems in biology, bioinformatics, computational biology, chemical informatics, bioengineering and related fields. The conference provides a global forum for academic and industrial scientists from a range of fields including computer science, biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, statistics, and engineering, to discuss and present their latest research findings from theory to applications.

The topics of interest for the special session include (but are not limited to):

  • Medical image classification
  • Medical image analysis
  • Expert systems for computer aided diagnosis and prognosis
  • Pattern recognition in the analysis of biomarkers for medical diagnosis
  • Deep learning in medical image processing and analysis
  • Ethical and Security issues in machine learning for medical diagnosis and prognosis

Up-to-date information and submission details can be found on the IEEE CIBCB 2017. The submission deadline is the 14th of April, 2017.

Please e-mail srostami@bournemouth.ac.uk with any questions.

Need tips on developing a publication strategy?

BRIAN, Guidance, open access, Publishing, writing

Then come along to one of the Writing Academy’s “My publication story so far…” lunchbyte sessions.

The first of 2017, is happening today at midday led by Prof. Matthew Bennett.

Matthew Bennett will be talking about his personal publishing experience, his approaches to research and writing, his tips on developing a publication strategy and working with co-authors, reviewers and editors. He will talk about all types of publishing from journal articles, to books via edited compilations. Drawing on personal experience publishing in Nature, he will also focus on how you target high impact journals.

Click here to book on!

Future sessions:

Prof. Tim Rees – Wednesday 24th May, 12-1.30pm

Prof. Sara Ashencaen Crabtree – Wednesday 28th June, 12-1.30pm

Click here to book on!

New midwifery paper by Dr. Jenny Hall

international, Publishing, writing

Congratulations to Dr. Jenny Hall in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) on the publication of her paper ‘Spiritual aspects of living with infertility: synthesis of qualitative studies’. [1]  Dr. Hall co-authored this paper in the Journal of Clinical Nursing with colleagues from Ireland and Portugal.

This international team conducted review and synthesis of qualitative research to seek a deeper understanding of the spiritual aspects of patients’ experiences of infertility.  They concluded that infertile couples’ experiences of infertility may offer an opportunity for spiritual care particularly related to the assessment of spiritual needs and the promotion of spiritual coping strategies. Moreover, effective holistic care should support couples in overcoming and finding meaning in this life and health condition.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Prof. Tim Rees – My publication story so far…

Guidance, open access, Publishing, writing

On Wednesday 24th May, the Writing Academy will be hosting a Lunchbyte session with Tim Rees. During the session Tim will talk about his personal publishing experience, his approaches to research and writing, his tips on developing a publication strategy and working with co-authors, reviewers and editors. He will talk about all types of publishing drawing on personal experience.

Aims:

  • Developing a Publication Strategy
  • Dealing with Co-Editors, Reviewers & Editors
  • Targeting high impact Journals

Click here to book on!